Africa’s underdevelopment is largely an ethical issue related to corruption and poor leadership. This RS will interrogate this issue with the aim of critically relating national ethos and values to character formation. It will also interrogate variables such as metaphysics, epistemology and logic—all theoretical—and how they impact on ethics. Critical interrogation of such variables will be essential in delivering transformation in society that will inform the right mindset leading to desired ethical value systems. The dynamic and interlinked nature of African society calls upon transformation of the African mindset in addressing the varied ethical challenges in modern society. A mindset that excludes the ‘others’ has to be interrogated with the objective of asserting the reality of diversity towards unity in plurality.

Eunice Kamaara (Ethics)

Masese Eric; (Sociology)

Emily Choge-Kerama, , (Theology/Disability)

Mary Lonynagapuo (Linguistics)

Paul Nyongesa (Reproductive Health)

Mary Wahome (Ethics)

Ongoing/proposed Project: Changing Life Projects: African Identities, Moralities and Wellbeing

In this RS, African indigenous knowledge, ideas and things including material culture and technologies will be researched, shared, debated in workshops and explained within the global schemata of knowledges and their usefulness. One outcome will be to explain why African knowledges and technologies are always deemed immobile thus uncommon globally. Traditional African mobilities aimed at exchanging goods, wealth, marriage and quest for subsistence. Today, (in)voluntary mobilities relate to income generation, employment and work but also there are forced mobilities of people, their cultures and behaviours and their experiences. This RS will research and map these mobility patterns, to explain how they fit in universal forms of mobilities and into knowledges of mobility studies

Omar Egesah, (Anthropology)

Anne Nangulu, (History)

Joram Kareithi, (Anthropology)

Masita Edna (Anthropology)

Lynn Kisembe, (African Linguistics)

Fred Okaka, (Geography)

Ongoing Research: Framing Identities from Human Agency Mobility on the Kenya-Uganda Highway

The primary geographical research area is Africa. In this thematic area we seek to interrogate how the different forms of artistic expressions constitute part of a complex network of relations that produce knowledges on Africa at times through refractions of dominant epistemologies; How artistic representation (itself understood as already multi-focal, multi-dimensional and multi-lingual) of contemporary realities in Africa proceed with a reflexive mediation and production of multiple positionalities as phenomena that define Africa. African aesthetics, working as it were through multiple traditions, spatialities and temporalities offer important ways of engaging the notions of multiplicity and diversity as terms that map African “lifeworlds”.

Christopher Odhiambo, (Performing Arts)

Tom M. Mboya, (Popular Culture)

Peter Simatei, (African/Diaspora Literatures)

Wegesa Busolo

Basil Okon’go

Mosol Kendakor

Ongoing Research: East African Asian Writing and the Emergence of a Diasporic Subjectivity

The RS is concerned with the ways in which African texts (texts here understood in Karin Barber’s definition as stretches of discourse which can be reproduced and thus transmitted over time and space) produce, and in the process engage knowledge produced about Africa.

Focus on how the emergence of an oppositional subjectivity in these texts relates to suspicions of how the production of knowledge has been used and can be used to legitimate hegemonic structures of power, but more significantly the interest will be on how the texts constitute multiple ways of knowing Africa being themselves already marked by multiple traditions. We are attentive not only to the historical moments in which literary texts are produced, but also to the specific spatial contexts of their emergence and how this gestures to the future Africa.

Justine Sikuku, (Linguistics)

Nathan Ogechi, (African Linguistics)

Peter Simatei (African & African Diaspora literatures)

Samuel Ndogo, (African & African Diaspora literatures)

Scholastica Adeli, (Psychology)

Carolyne Sambai (African Drama)

Ongoing/Proposed projects: Pots, Fire and Gourds: A (Re)presentation of African Knowledge Systems.

With the introduction of the media technologies in Africa, religious communities in the continent have appropriated the new technology in innovative ways as a learning space.

This RS will therefore investigate the mediation of religious epistemologies as a form of knowledge transmission under numerous themes:

(a) Gendered and mediatized religious content (themes). Questions raised in this strand include: Gender influence in the representations of religious authority in Africa.

(b) Production, circulation modes, and commercialization of religious knowledge.

This strand posits that the production of the mediated religious knowledge and the increasing concern to employ them, on both religious and financial grounds imply a religious economy is established.

While exploring the two strands, the RS will examine the (de)-construction of traditions, concepts and practices resulting from interaction and communication through the mediated religious knowledge.

Hassan Nzovu, (Islamic Studies)

 Mohamed Mraja, (Islamic Studies)

Wario Halkano, (Religious Studies)

Chembea, Suleiman, (Islamic Studies)

Simon Omare, (Religious studies)

Evans Mugarizi, (Performing Arts)

Emily Choge (Religious Studies)

Ongoing Research: Mediated and Mediatization of Islamic Knowledge in Kenya: Educational Institutions, Media Technologies and Performative Aesthetics.

Out of the desire to maximize economic gains and to strategically position themselves in the unfavorable world economic system, most African countries upon attaining independence, moved quickly to embrace regional economic integration as one of the desirable vehicles to this end (Linn and Oksana, 2008). Egged on by the newly formed Organization of African Unity (OAU), discussions that divided Africa into possible six economic blocks followed (Qobo, 2007). Currently the African Union (AU) recognizes eight Regional Economic Corporations in the continent, a clear testimony of the perceived usefulness of Integration (AU, 2019). The African Union on its part treats these RECs as the building blocks for the anticipated African Economic Community. However, the successes of the RECs are hardly impressive even for those that have lasted for over four decades such as the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) (Qobo, 2007). Volumes of literature have been dedicated to uncovering and analyzing economic and policy factors that have contributed to the dismal achievements by these RECs even though there is a consensus that they are indeed desirable (Nye 2004, Etzioni, 1962, Trudi, 2011). The markets have not been fully integrated, governance and decision making remains a challenge while many stated objectives are far from being realized. The vexed question of state sovereignty and overlapping membership remain huge obstacles to the full realization of the fruits of integration for many countries. It is therefore important to attempt to understand why RECS as political, economic and social affiliations have not achieved many of their stated goals and how these obstacles and challenges can be overcome. This Research Section  proposes to assess the performance of the frameworks of regional integration in Eastern and Southern Africa. In doing so, the RS will analyze the architecture of interactive markets, governance and decision making, and human rights protection.

Ken Oluoch, (Political Science)

Henry J Lugulu,(Law)

Peter Ndege

Dr. Paul Kurgat

Dr. Prisca Tanui Too

Dr. Paul Opondo

Ms. Linda Khaemba

Mr. Dulo Nyaoro

Mr Vincent K Mutai

Mr. Kilongi Wenani

Mr. Maurice Oduor

Ongoing/Proposed Project: Regional integration in Eastern and Southern Africa: An appraisal of the frameworks for interactive markets, effective governance and human rights protection